The World is Small at the Top
Cornell’s 2015 Hatfield Lecture was given on Sept. 17 by Mark Weinberger, global chairman and CEO of EY. Weinberger spoke about how to run a successful business in a changing world and emphasized the need to build diverse teams who will not only give you a wide range of inputs and perspectives, but also give you access to their respective specialties and markets.
In my mind, these diverse teams allow you to be connected on a global scale, which is especially important as more emerging economies are gaining economic power and companies are vying for first access into these markets.
We learned in class about Milgram’s small world experiment, which involved people trying to ultimately get a letter to a stockbroker in Boston by mailing the letter to a friend, who would then send it to another friend, and so on. What Milgram discovered was that the letters oftentimes passed through a “hub”, a specific well-connected person who was basically the Boston stockbroker’s link to a certain group or segment of the population.
When this experiment was replicated in the early 2000’s via email, involving 60000 email-senders and 18 target people, what the researchers found was that it was much easier for the email-senders and their chain of connections to find well-known, prominent targets such as Cornell professor Steven Strogatz. On the other hand, relatively obscure targets, such as a student in Serbia, were much harder to find, and some targets did not receive any of the emails that were targeted toward them. This is due to the fact that relatively high-status figures are often involved in many organizations, have built a reputation in their field, and have expansive networks from schools they have attended or companies where they have worked. Many people know them, and they can be accessed from many different channels.
Going along with what Weinberger spoke about, I believe that if one wants to be successful in building a global business, it is very helpful to have a global network of friends and colleagues who can be one’s bridge into a certain industry or country. I feel so blessed to have friends from many different countries, and by talking to them, I have learned about the geopolitical atmospheres in Germany, Jordan, Liberia, Paskistan, China, and so on. Cornell is a great place to meet a diverse array of people from different backgrounds, interests, and fields, and geographic regions. And according to Mark Weinberger, the diverse friends we make during our four years here will be our strengths in the future.
Source:
http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/09/build-diverse-team-diverse-world-weinberger-urges